There was no sign of darkening around his eyelids, no other signs that his body was giving out from treatment. He reached down to his peacock assistant. And, when the gryphons of the Abyssal Naze had found out what he was doing with their captured pridemates, it had cost him his favorite workshop and a reeve’s ransom of purple elixir. The experiment that had granted him his black eyes had taken his speech. Mally’s voice came out in clicks and hisses, echoing throughout the pen and startling the Redwood Valley opinici. Now, his feathers were leached white by disease, his talons and beak stained red. The beautiful peafowl had once been a vibrant green and blue. Mally ignored it, assuming it was someone trying to get his attention, but one of his assistants collapsed. Perhaps I was a little too hasty in killing the headmaster.Ī cough came from behind him. Whatever Neider had done with Mally’s research, it had worked-on eggs. The ones in his pens tested positive for the iron disorder, but they weren’t dying of it. Mally had tested all of the refugees from New Eyrie. His research had served as the basis that allowed Headmaster Neider to come up with a cure that only worked on eggs. Little did these opinici know they owed Mally their lives, after a fashion. Wealth and land for their loved ones, perhaps? Mally wasn’t sure what the Seraph King had promised them. A parrot opinicus who had once been blue, red, and green cowered. Several northern quarter Redwood Valley opinici regarded him with trepidation.
While his assistants cleaned up the mess, Mally wandered through the holding pens. If he hadn’t found a cure by the second treatment, it would be too late. Some came from having used alchemy to reset his biology so many times.īy the reflection, he had two treatments left before his organs would fail.
Some of his issues came from the disease that had haunted him his entire life. His joints ached, and the gape of his beak sometimes bled without provocation. He could see the markers of strain around his black eyes. He grabbed a cloth and wiped sand off of a mirror sitting on a workshop bench. He wasn’t as interested in the number of times he could dose someone with the essential salts so much as the signs that the body was starting to give. Some subjects gave out at seven, others made it to thirteen. While he valued his assistants and their input, they were still learning what to look for and relied upon him to make sense of their observations.Įleven. The newer ones avoided looking at his strange, twisted body, but the older ones had grown accustomed to it. His assistants came in to remove the corpse for examination. They were always unruly, and the local varieties were prone to holding a grudge. The nearby jail was starting to run low on prisoners, and he didn’t want to go back to experimenting on gryphons. Had opinici really evolved from seraphs, Mally hoped that essence might still be hidden somewhere far enough back.Īt least thus far, his hypothesis wasn’t bearing fruit for anything except the graves outside of Whitebeak. Treating someone with the salts without adding in blood made them regress, as though there were attributes of past birds and gryphons hidden in their very essence. He’d run it through the changes as many times as the body would take until its heart gave out. It had been an opinicus once, and not one in favor with the Seraph King. Mally watched as his latest experiment coughed its last breath and gave out. Map of Belamuria (West) Map of Belamuria (East)